Up for auction the "Nobel Prize for Physics" Nevill Mott Hand Signed 2.5X2.5 B&W Photo. This item is authenticated By Todd
Mueller Autographs and comes with their certificate of authenticity.
ES-8398E
Sir
Nevill Francis Mott CH FRS (30
September 1905 – 8 August 1996) was a British physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in
1977 for his work on the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems, especially amorphous semiconductors.
The award was shared with Philip W. Anderson and J. H. Van Vleck. The three
had conducted loosely related research. Mott and Anderson clarified the reasons
why magnetic or amorphous materials can sometimes be metallic and sometimes
insulating. Mott was born in Leeds to Lilian Mary Reynolds
and Charles Francis Mott and
grew up first in the village of Giggleswick, in the West Riding of Yorkshire,
where his father was Senior Science Master at Giggleswick School. His
mother also taught Maths at the School. The family moved (due to his father's
jobs) first to Staffordshire, then to Chester and finally Liverpool, where his
father had been appointed Director of Education. Mott was at first educated at
home by his mother, who was a Cambridge Mathematics Tripos graduate. His
parents had met in the Cavendish Laboratory, when
both were engaged in physics research. At age ten, he began formal education
at Clifton College in
Bristol, then at St John's College,
Cambridge, where he read the Mathematics Tripos.
Mott was appointed a Lecturer in the Physics Department at the University of Manchester in
1929. He returned to Cambridge in 1930 as a Fellow and lecturer of Gonville and
Caius College, and in 1933 moved to the University of Bristol as
Melville Wills Professor in Theoretical Physics. In 1948 he became Henry Overton Wills Professor
of Physics and Director of the Henry Herbert Wills Physical
Laboratory at Bristol. In 1954 he was appointed Cavendish Professor of
Physics at Cambridge, a post he held until 1971. He was
instrumental in the painful cancellation of the planned particle accelerator because
of its very high cost. He also served as Master of Gonville and Caius College,
1959–1966. His early works were on the theoretical analysis of collisions in
gases, notably the collision with spin flip of an
electron against a hydrogen atom, which would stimulate subsequent
works by André Blandin and Jun Kondo about similar effects between conduction electrons, as well as magnetic properties in
metals. This sort of activity led Mott to writing two books. The first one,
which was edited together with Ian Sneddon, gives a simple and clear description of quantum
mechanics, with an emphasis on the Schrödinger equation in real space. The
second describes atomic and electronic collisions in gases, using the
rotational symmetry of electronic states in
the Hartree–Fock method. But
already in the middle of the 1930s, Mott's interests had broadened to include
solid states, leading to two more books that would have a great impact on the
development of the field in the years prior and after World War II. In 1936, Theory of the Properties of
Metals and Alloys (written together with H. Jones) describes a
simplified framework which led to rapid progresses.[ The
concept of nearly free valence electrons in
metallic alloys explained the special stability of the Hume-Rothery phases if
the Fermi sphere of
the sp Valence electron, treated
as free, would be scattered by the Brillouin zone boundaries of the atomic structure. The
description of the impurities in metals by the Thomas Fermi approximation would
explain why such impurities would not interact at long range. Finally the
delocalisation of the valence d electrons in transitional metals and alloys would explain the
possibility for the magnetic moments of
atoms to be expressed as fractions of Bohr magnetons, leading to ferro or antiferromagnetic coupling
at short range. This last contribution, produced at the first international
conference on magnetism, held in Strasbourg in May 1939, reinforced similar points of view
defended at the time in France by the future Nobel laureate Louis Néel. In 1949, Mott suggested to Jacques Friedel to use the approach developed together
with Marvey for a more accurate description of the electric-field screening of
the impurity in a metal, leading to the characteristic long range charge
oscillations. Friedel also used the concept developed in that book of virtual
bound level to describe a situation when the atomic potential considered is not
quite strong enough to create a (real) bound level of symmetry e ≠ o. The consequences of these remarks on the more exact approaches of cohesion in
rp as well as d metals were mostly developed by his students in Orsay. The second book, with Ronald Wilfred Gurney, On
the Physical Chemistry of Solids was more diverse. It treated notably
of the oxidation of metals at low temperatures, where it described the growth
of the oxide layer as due to the electric field developed between the metal and
absorbed oxygen ions, which could force the way of metallic or oxygen ions
through a disordered oxide layer. The book also analysed the photographic
reactions in ionic silver compound in terms of precipitation of silver ions
into metallic clusters. This second field had a direct and long lasting
consequence on the research activity of John (Jack) Mitchell. Mott's accomplishments
include explaining theoretically the effect of light on a photographic emulsion (see latent image). His work on oxidation, besides fostering new
research in the field (notably by J. Bénard and Nicolás Cabrera), was the
root of the concept of the band gap produced in semiconductors
by gradients in the distribution of donor and acceptor impurities.
When Mott returned to Bristol after the war, (during that period, he worked on
the role of plastic deformation on the progression of fracture cracks), his
having met and hired of Frederick Charles Frank led
both of them to develop, with the help of others such as Frank Nabarro and Alan Cottrell, to attack with the field of dislocations, in which Bristol shone with a new vigor,
especially at the end of the 1940s. If Mott only produced early and somewhat
minor contributions to that field, notably on alloy hardening with Nabarro and
on the topology of a dislocation network lowering the apparent elastic
constants of a crystal, there is no doubt that Mott's enthusiasm played its
role in the three major steps forward in the field by F. C. Frank on crystal
growth and plasticity and later, in Cambridge, by P. Hirsch on the thin film
electron microscopy. At the same time, however, Mott started playing
around electronic correlations and
their possible role in Verwey's compounds such
as nickel oxides which could switch from metals to insulators under various
physical conditions (transition of substances from metallic to nonmetallic
states (Mott transition). The
term Mott insulator is
also named for him, as well as the Mott polynomials, which he introduced.